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Scottish Sceptic: The Climate wars – toward a washup review.

This is a partial reblog of a post by the Scottish sceptic. Head on over to his site to read the full article.

The Climate wars – toward a washup review.the Scottish Sceptic

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As I said a while back (The limits of Climate Hysteria) we’ve now reached the stage in these “climate wars” whereby the climate itself is the main combatant forcing the ranks of the delusional public academia, to be dragged kicking and screaming to the reality of our ever varying climate, as the climate itself now imposes discipline where the idiots in the so called “institutions” of so-called “science” failed.

In other words, when we only had a few years of data and a lot of climate variables, it was far far too easy to “investigate” the most worrying trends and then to further cherry pick the data. Then to write up this cherry picked data and publish in buddy review journals, put on Wikipedia as “settled science” and try to convince the world your religion has a credible basis. But, the more data that is acquired and the more people look into every nook and cranny and not just the short-term worrisome trends, the more the real picture of a continuously varying climate emerges and so the less important any one short-term change appears. The more people who gather data, the less any individual can cherry-pick the data to e.g. claim “snow is disappearing” in a warm winter or “floods are increasing” in a floody year or “droughts are increasing” in a dry year.

Or perhaps, the better way to put this is this: if as occurred, the climate academics cherry picked the data to show increasing droughts in years of drought, they cannot so easily then create trends showing increasing rainfall and floods in the following years of flood.

Tumbling Academic Credibility
We are now in the period of tumbling academic credibility. Politicians, media and public don’t know what the climate will do any more than the academics, but, what we outside academia do know now, is that the academics didn’t know any more than anyone else and that they lied, lied and lied again, either dishonestly or delusionally. Clearly as the trends like global ice return to “normal” and the climate fails to warm for the 18th year in a row, we might not know what the climate is going to do, but what we do know is that academics are a bunch of thoroughly untrustworthy people.

A few years ago, Climategate gave academia the opportunity to recover the situation, to impose standards. Whilst they could not have had their cake and eat it – they couldn’t both push the politics of environmentalism and retain their credibility – they could have at least kept their credibility if they forsook the climate non-science. Instead they lost both.

A few decades ago, such a fiasco would have been embarrassing at the time, but because academia used to write our history, they quickly rewrote the story, to make it appear academia were blameless. So, e.g. Piltdown Mann is now a story of a conman, not of arrogant academics ready to accept any evidence that supported their pet theories. However, now history is being written outside academia on the internet, so this fiasco will never be forgotten and the blame will remain fairly and squarely on the nonscientifical shoulders of academia.

What was different this time
But in truth, most sensible people have always known that “academics” are often wrong and we can’t read too much into that. But something was clearly different this time. So, why then, did global warming take off as a state sponsored religion? The key factors appear to be these:

The rise of the internet and the early adoption of its use by academia, temporarily created an “academic bubble”. This came about because the internet allowed academia bypassed the common-sense filter of the media, and free from the constraints imposed on it by peer-review, the anonymity of the internet allowed academics like Mann to orchestrate a campaign of disinformation through sites like Wikipedia. So, public funding created an army of zealots who could use the the new media to spread their extremist non-science which could never have got through even the very biased peer review system of academia.

The internet undermined the profitability of the private media. This left the public sector media like the BBC and ABC as the dominant force in media. And like all public sector they are delusionally pro-environment (i.e. anti-private sector, anti-industrial, anti-fossil fuels). So, for a while the anti-industry views of people like the BBC were largely unchallenged by the private sector.

The growth of technology from the 1970s onward created a huge “mine” of data which could be sifted to find apparently worrying “trends”.

The creation of NASA (created to suggest a civilian use for space) created an organisation with no real purpose which needed to manufacture a “need” for it to exist. This it found by exaggerating global problems like Ozone and CO2 which “needed” monitoring by expensive NASA led projects. In turn this added to the bubble of new data with new measurements. NASA needed people to look at this and find “problems” than “needed” NASA. So it gave away the data to anyone who was likely to write it up as a problem needing more NASA-led space probes. So, again, the public sector “scare machine” was subsidised and empowered by the climate data-bubble.

The rise in global “environmentalism” empowered rather groups like WWF, Greenpeace, etc. who became global commercial companies to rival any other global corp – but who like snakes in sheep’s clothing, were not only in it for the money like the wolves, but they were far worse as they also had political intent. And again, these groups fed of the public sector as well as milking the private sector who they blackmailed for their donations.

So, much of the global warming scam was a chance historical accident due to the “public sector” dislike of private sector because of a public-sector hatred of fossil-fueled industry.

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It’s a mostly great analysis, although I think the pro-EU civil servants are let off too lightly. They channelled our money not only into academia but into the NGO’s like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF, to lobby the govt. to do what they wanted to do in the first place – place a tax on carbon based life itself.

“So, where do we go from here?”
Simple, sack/jail the most dishonest academics and politicians for this ludicrously expensive scam.
Top of my list would be Mann, Jones, Slingo, Wadhams, Yeo, Davey, Huhne (whoops the liar has already been in jail)- and I could go on.

As I have maintained and will continue to maintain unless PROVEN wrong the climate system has a tremendous amount of noise in it, it is non linear and subject to thresholds. These factors make it next to impossible to get a strong correlation with factors that influence the climate despite the fact that they do influence the climate.

This is why thus far not one climate forecast for future conditions has been correct on a consistent basis. I take that back not even one seasonal forecast in advance for climate conditions has been correct on a consistent basis much less the climate.

What I have come across in this field are people that try to justify what they say and using any means to show they are right while everyone else is wrong. The truth is they are also wrong and have yet to show otherwise. It is getting old and most of the material is the same arguments with just a different spin.

My argument is if solar parameters reach extreme enough values and stay at those values for a sufficient amount of time they will over come the noise in the climate system and exert an influence on the climate in general terms.

I am also of the opinion that given solar changes will never result in the same climatic out come due to the beginning initial state of the earth in regards to present climate, land /ocean arrangements ,random terrestrial or extra terrestrial events and so on. The best that can be done is to forecast a general climatic trend.

This is why when I hear the climate will do this or that because of this or that to a point of exactness I just shake my head. Another annoying point is so many try to relate the climate to one particular item which will rule the vast climatic system which is ridiculous with the exception of the sun. Which we know that if it is variable enough it will exert an influence on the climate, The argument here however is, is it variable enough. I SAY YES.

In conclusion I think this field is in a state of complete disarray and needs to be approached in an entirely different manner. A more humble approach for lack of a better word.

I recall Steve McIntyre once commenting to Myles Allen that having to ‘always be right’ was maybe one of the burdens of an academic. When it comes to hubris I think CliSci has special problems because it takes so long for reality to prove the models wrong. Many of them will be retired or dead by the time the fat lady sings.

I do not like the term “common sense” as “climate” is a complex mix of hypotheses, data evaluation and policy proposals. It is something outside of what people have experienced before. Neither do the claimed experts in the “climate community” do not draw upon other areas – such as philosophy of science (e.g. Karl Popper or Thomas Kuhn) or what economics has do say about decision-making under conditions of uncertainty or how a court of law would rank evidence according to quality and relevance. Instead they have a new way of evaluation – through models.

From Wikipedia
“Common sense is a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge things, which is shared by (“common to”) nearly all people, and can be reasonably expected of nearly all people without any need for debate.”

But confront a supporter of the “climate community” with the notion of “common sense” and they might say that
1. If a consensus of leading experts in the field tells you there is a problem, then you should accept it.
2. If those in authority and expertise say they have a solution, then you ought to agree with them.

When there is a situation outside our experience it is better to try to understand the problem in new ways, and be aware of the very human bias of jumping to conclusions.

Salvatore Del Prete wrote:
“the climate system has a tremendous amount of noise in it, it is non linear and subject to thresholds…if solar parameters reach extreme enough values and stay at those values for a sufficient amount of time they will over come the noise in the climate system and exert an influence on the climate in general terms…given solar changes will never result in the same climatic out come due to the beginning initial state…when I hear the climate will do this or that because of this or that to a point of exactness I just shake my head. Another annoying point is so many try to relate the climate to one particular item which will rule the vast climatic system which is ridiculous…In conclusion I think this field is in a state of complete disarray and needs to be approached in an entirely different manner. A more humble approach for lack of a better word.”

I enjoyed this assessment, it strikes me as very reasonable. The scary thing is that you can apply the same reasoning to other fields such as health/medicine, it is not limited to climate research. The popular approach to studying dynamic, complex systems seems to be too “reductionist” to plausibly yield useful conclusions, yet people are pumping out thousands to tens of thousands “conclusions” a year. How accurate is any of this stuff?